Dr Roula Nezi

How does division in society along cultural issues influence affective polarisation? This paper argues that affective polarisation expressed as a group identity on the basis of partisanship can enforce inter-group conflicts on cultural and austerity issues. In our study we employ data from a newly collected data in Greece. Our analysis suggests that cultural and austerity issues reinforced divides and inter-group conflicts even today. Our findings have implications for understanding how affective polarisation can be conditional on views towards cultural and economic issues.

The onset of the economic crisis and the austerity measures outlined in the EU\IMF bailout were followed by a series of large-scale protests in Greece. The continuous mobilization, for several weeks, of the Indignant Citizens was a distinct part of the overall events during this period. In this article, we focus on the mass mobilization of protesters who occupied Syntagma Square in May-June 2011. For our analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the protesters involved in the mobilization. Focusing on their political attitudes, the article approaches their perspectives on democracy. Our results suggest that the Indignants' acceptance of an idealized form of democracy on the one hand, and the distrust of parliamentary practices, actors, and performance on the other, signify a demand for a new politics beyond the framework of representative democracy. Disappointment with representative politics and the glorification of direct democracy constitute the most important facets of this mobilization which left its mark on the Greek political scene.

Public opinion research has found that increasing the investment in education is generally very popular among citizens in Western Europe. However, this evidence from publicly available opinion surveys may be misleading, because these surveys do not force respondents to prioritize between different parts of the education system or between education and other social policies, nor do they provide information about citizens' willingness to pay for additional investment in education. To address these deficiencies, we conducted an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related policies in eight European countries. Our analysis confirms that citizens express high levels of support for education even when they are forced to choose between education and other areas of social spending. But not all educational sectors enjoy equally high levels of support: increasing spending on general schooling and vocational education is more popular than increasing spending on higher education and early childhood education. Furthermore, we find that citizens are, in fact, willing to pay additional taxes in order to finance investment in education, at least in some countries and for some sectors of the education system.

Late Peter Mair argued that, in the contemporary multilevel institutional setting of global governance, parties are faced with a dilemma between Responsiveness and Responsibility (RR dilemma). However, Mair did not theorize variation in how different parties experience the RR dilemma (degrees of tension) and how they manage it (strategies). We develop his work in three ways: first, we advance variants of the RR dilemma, where the tension party leaders face differs, and elucidate how viable contenders for executive office are likely to behave in each of these scenarios, and why. Second, we highlight domestic institutional factors (electoral rules and leadership autonomy) that regulate the pressure for responsiveness to public opinion and to partisans. Third, we place the RR dilemma in the context of multidimensional issue competition, which helps identify strategies for managing it. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration of our arguments using data on public opinion and partisans. We show that although responsibility can be combined with (some) voters’ representation, tension is high when leaders are constrained and partisans oppose responsibility even if the public endorses it; also, under disproportional electoral rules when the public opposes responsibility, even if party supporters endorse it.